The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : Heartbroken Family Looks for Their Mom

The rumors have been cruel.

“I heard they found your mother chopped up in pieces in a plastic bag behind the Laundromat,” said one caller.

“I heard they found her dead at Sylmar Park,” said another.

Those are just a couple of the calls that Tanya Nevarez says her family has received since launching a search for her mother, who disappeared Jan. 17.

“I don’t know if they’re trying to be mean or if they’re just ignorant,” she says.

Despite the pain the malicious calls cause, Tanya Nevarez says she and about 100 of her friends and family members are continuing to search for her mother, Sandra Nevarez, who was reported missing to police after two of her sons found her Chevy Nova parked, abandoned, behind a Sylmar Laundromat in the 13200 block of Gladstone Avenue.

The family got a boost last week when the Los Angeles City Council approved a $25,000 reward for information leading to the location of Sandra Nevarez and the conviction of any abductors.

According to family members, Nevarez, a 41-year-old mother of four, had gone to do the family’s laundry in the morning and was then spotted at a thrift store in the same mini-mall at about 3:30 p.m., which is around the same time she should have been picking up her youngest son from school.

Detectives who investigated the scene found spatters of blood nearby and the missing woman’s purse containing more than $100 cash underneath her car.

But there was no sign of Nevarez, who hasn’t been seen since.

In addition to an ongoing police investigation, Tanya Nevarez, 20, said friends and family have combed the nearby foothills, searched through abandoned houses and posted more than 4,000 flyers from Los Angeles to Palmdale.

“Every day we’re just going out there and looking,” Tanya Nevarez said. By “we” she means herself, her father and two brothers, and sometimes other relatives and friends.

Her family fears, she said, that members of the Latino community may be hesitating to come forward and help the police with their investigation because of Proposition 187’s strictures on illegal immigrants, even though almost all of the initiative’s provisions have been suspended by federal court order.

“We’ve walked around and questioned people and told them not to be afraid and that we just want to find my mom,” she said.

Their search has led them on many wild goose chases, triggered by people calling to say they had spotted the missing woman at locations throughout the San Fernando Valley.

“We jump in our car, and we get our hopes up,” Tanya Nevarez said. “Then we’re back at home wondering ‘Where are we going to search now?’ ”

For their part, Los Angeles police detectives have interviewed people in the community, contacted coroner’s offices in surrounding counties and notified the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“There was evidence at the scene, but that could easily be because she was a victim of an accident,” LAPD Detective Frank Bishop said.

“She could have also fallen and hit her head and somebody could have helped her, or she may have got up on her own and left.”

Bishop, the lead homicide investigator at the Foothill Division, said such cases typically are handled by his department’s missing persons unit Downtown. But because that unit is understaffed, the Nevarez case was handed over to his division.

Right now, Bishop said, it is still being treated as a missing-person investigation, but he warned that “We’re handling it as a worst-case scenario, just in case.”

The “worst” is something that has plagued Tanya Nevarez’s mind since her mother disappeared, she said.

“I feel that somebody wanted her and that they took her,” Tanya said. “I wonder what are these people doing to her if she’s still alive?”

Even sitting down to eat a meal has become a painful chore, the distraught daughter says.

“I stop and think ‘Is my mother eating; is anybody feeding her?” she says. “I just want to find her so that she can rest.”